October 9, 2003

Test Spin: The Fire Theft

When I think Sunny Day Real Estate, I hear the high pitched squeals of Jeremy Enigk desperately trying to purge his intense feelings. Inevitably, they come out as personal, clumsy lyrics. He’s searching, struggling to make some sense out of things. The heavy distortion of the electric guitars obscure his awkward vocals and are almost his masochistic response to his inability to do justice to what he writes about. SDRE was my inner child. They had me on my knees going, “Yes! YES!!” at the lyrical climax, “we’ll play guitar and video games.” The band’s music was grand and sweeping, launching a cult of emo-kids before they disbanded.

Now I sit here looking at Mr. Enigk’s crotch on the cover of his new album, which unfolds to reveal a picture of the band. They’ve hopped onto the trend. After releasing albums with obscure cover art, they’ve released one with a picture of themselves. Jeremy’s got a smirk on his face. He seems sure of himself. He’s got Nate Mendel and William Goldsmith of SDRE with him again for a rebirth of sorts. Under the moniker of The Fire Theft, the distorted guitars are traded in for lush string arrangements, which rather than obscuring his vocals, single them out. He sings his advice to us, “don’t burden your life when you can fill it up with joy,” rather than capturing the struggle that goes along with trying to do it. If he’s happier, then I’m happy for him, but for the first time I’m not with him. I’ll cry if I ever see Steven Albini smiling on the cover of an “adult contemporary” Shellac album.

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Eight 60-square-foot panels dominated Ho Plaza for two hours early Wednesday afternoon. The panels depicted images of Nazi death camps from the Holocaust juxtaposed with present-day factory farm and slaughterhouse scenes. The images were part of an exhibit entitled “Holocaust on Your Plate,” set up by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Beginning in San Francisco on Feb. 22, the exhibit has appeared in more than 50 cities in close to 40 states, according to Matt Prescott, campaign coordinator for PETA. Regarding the purpose of the exhibit, Prescott said, “People everywhere need to understand that by eating meat, dairy and eggs, they are supporting an industry that performs routine mutilations, such as castration and debeaking, without anesthesia. People everywhere, Cornell students included, should be outraged at this abuse.” The website associated with the PETA campaign cites the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer as the first to notice “the disturbing similarity between the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust and that of animals raised for food.” The website features a quote from Singer: “… in relation to [animals], all people are Nazis; for [them] it is an eternal Treblinka.” Treblinka was a Nazi extermination camp during World War II that was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 850,000 Jews. Singer’s quote also lent itself to the title of a 2002 book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson. Patterson believes the book was a central source of inspiration for the PETA campaign. The PETA campaign has met resistance in many cities on its tour. Prescott said some cities have tried to deny permission to erect the display, but all legal cases have been settled out of court. Several newspaper articles have also featured outspoken Jewish communities protesting the exhibit. Within minutes of setting up on Ho Plaza, the display incited a protest group of students challenging PETA with signs and verbal arguments. “I was one of the counter-protesters — I had a sign that said ‘My Aunt Was Not a Chicken — She Was a Human Being,'” said Dan Greenwald ’05. A few other students also protested the exhibit with signs, and a larger contingent expressed their opinions verbally. “There were about four people with signs, but a group of about 20 was constantly arguing with PETA and maybe 50 more people walked by and argued with them at some point,” said David Klein ’05, whose sign read, “My Relatives Were People.” “One girl just started screaming and crying; it was pretty ugly for a while,” Greenwald added. To Greenwald, the exhibit “represents true moral depravity — an inability to recognize the sanctity of human life — the sanctity of human life isn’t uniquely a Jewish, Christian or Muslim thing — it’s something recognized by nearly every civilization that has ever walked the earth.” Klein saw the exhibit as “an absolute joke — there’s no way to equate the genocidal treatment of people to the killing of animals — animals that are a source of food to people.” “I think it’s easy to misinterpret,” said Clair Whittet ’04, president of the Cornell Coalition for Animal Defense, which sponsored PETA’s display on campus. “It’s easy to think that our bottom line is to compare people and animals, but it isn’t. My response to students who are upset at the display is that they are not wrong to feel upset. The display contained very upsetting subject matter. I would hope that they can understand that we were not trying to demean Jews, to belittle the plight of the Jews who died during the Holocaust, but to show that the brutal, cruel, torturous and utterly unjustifiable actions perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II are still being conducted on millions of animals every year.” Prescott, who is Jewish, reinforced Whittet’s interpretation of the exhibit. “We’re trying to show people that the mindset which allowed people to turn away from the Holocaust, the notion that we can ignore suffering if we are not directly affected by it, is the same mindset that allows 28 billion animals a year to be confined in cages and crates, pumped full of growth-inducing hormones and antibiotics, and often boiled alive,” he said. Before bringing the exhibit to campus, the CCAD consulted Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, executive director of Cornell Hillel. “We expressed our intent not to offend the Jewish community but rather to show how grievous the plight of animals in factory farms is wrong,” Whittet said. While the crowd of protesters was constant during the two hours the exhibit was shown, not as many students were there to support PETA. Whittet said she was not able to attend the event. “I did not see a single student who was there supporting PETA,” Klein observed, “and there is plenty of student support against animal cruelty, but not now.” According to Sue McNamara, assistant to the dean of students, “the event yesterday was not considered a rally, it was considered an information table reserved through [the] Straight.” PETA’s right to bring potentially controversial subject matter to campus is protected by the Campus Code of Conduct, according to Susan H. Murphy ’73, vice president for student and academic services. “In my 10 years as vice president, I do not recall not permitting a speaker, activity, demonstration [or] protest because of potentially objectionable content,” she said. Murphy recognized the potential complications involved with the exhibit and before the event, said, “We will make sure that it is staffed properly, maybe with police, maybe with event managers; we will make sure that our Campus Code of Conduct is properly upheld.” Despite the resistance, Whittet thought the event was a success. “I think that if the display encouraged even one person to question the ethics of factory farming, if it made one person think for a second the next time they reach for a ham sandwich, we accomplished our goal,” Whittet explained. “For every vegetarian or even every person who decides to buy meat from small, non-industrialized farms there are thousands of animals who will be spared a fate of brutality and suffering, and to us, that is a victory.” Archived article by Tony Apuzzo

Students, faculty and staff gathered at noon yesterday on Ho Plaza in a rally against the celebration of Columbus Day this Monday. Native American Students at Cornell was the main organizer of the rally. The group had the support of other organizations on campus: the American Indian Program, Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA), the Akwe:kon program house and the Latino Living Center. These groups supported the rally because they feel that the image of Columbus as a hero is a Native American concern as well as a Latino and an African-American issue. “The indigenous people are near extinction,” said Victoria R. Lopez, residence hall director of the LLC. Another grievance of NASAC is that Columbus Day occurs during fall break each year. The treasurer of NASAC, Anpao Duta Flying Earth ’04, said he doesn’t feel that Columbus Day warrants the acknowledgment of a vacation. Participants of the rally handed out flyers to passersby in front of the Straight. The flyers stated the crimes of Christopher Columbus to be the murder of more than 12 million Indians, the kidnapping and illegal transportation of African people and the depopulation of thirty Caribbean islands. Four speeches were also given at the rally, focusing on the encouragement of open debate and increasing knowledge about issues not taught in American schools. Professor Speaks The first speaker was Prof. Lloyd Elm, American Indian studies. He said that “traditional American schools sanitize information.” When important information is left out of lessons, he said, students are left with the impression that “the human history of this great, great, country began in 1492.” He praised Cornell for offering more diverse and culturally representative courses and said that “everyone deserves to have their history taught at Cornell.” Through these courses, “young people are gaining the gifts of multiple perspectives,” he added. Jason Corwin ’02, the media assistant at Cornell’s film program, was the second speaker. He presented Native Americans’ grievances against Columbus Day as allowing stereotypes to continue and the full implications of the genocide of indigenous people to go unacknowledged. Corwin said that “without taking a look at our human history, genocide could happen again.” He then went on to recommend two books that gave what he said are more diverse and accurate perceptions of history: A People’s History of the United States: 1942-Present by Howard Zinn and A Little Matter of Genocide by Ward Churchill. Corwin continued to stress the importance of debate — and, he said, the lack thereof — at Cornell. In the spring of 2002, Corwin said he went to the Cornell Review, which supports Columbus Day, to invite representatives to a formal debate. They agreed and decided on which issues of Western civilization were to be brought up at the debate. The Cornell Review pulled out with no clear reason, according to Corwin, and the debate never took place. Corwin states that without open arguments, people cannot “reflect on what [they] have been taught and seek out other information.” Currently, Anpao plans to create a Cornell-sponsored genocide panel or conference. Through this panel, he said, serious discussions can be fostered about the implications of genocides, such as those found in America, Rwanda and Germany. Philip Fiadino, a Catholic chaplain at the University, did not initially know that the event was taking place. However, as he passed by the rally he felt the motivation to speak. He talked about his experience of bringing students from elite Catholic schools to Native American reservations. These students, he said, were shocked at seeing such despair, including poverty and alcoholism, on the reservations. He went on to say that just listening to these problems was not enough. The final speaker was Sam Strong ’07. He read a passage from Zinn’s book, which reflected a Native American’s perspective of the European conquest of the Americas. The rally closed with a performance by the White Pine Singers. A sign at the rally suggested the creation of an Americas’ Day, stating that “the Native Americans will support America so long as America does not just forget them.” Archived article by Casey Holmes